This post was published 3 months 17 days ago. This info might have changed or might have become outdated.

Can the end of the “Netbook Era” already be upon us? What’s more, will the netbook’s extinction event be the return of a technology that had it’s glory days 10 years ago?

I vividly remember the time when, as far a mobile computing was concerned, RISC chips were king and most of them featured ARM architecture. Underpowered, tiny ARM-based RISC chips ran all the coolest PDAs (yeah, I know, but that wasn’t always an oxymoron) from Palm and HP and Dell and Sony…and the hottest mobile phones. In some areas that popularity has never died. At least one RISC chip was found in 98 percent of all phones sold in 2007 and other consumer electronics such as handheld games, MP3 players, external hard drives, routers and more still utilize RISC chips. Low power consumption was what made the ARM architecture the mobile CPU to beat. The smaller the device, the smaller the battery and the more it needed ARM.

However, the death of PDAs was a major blow to the popularity of ARM as a CPU for serious computing. Suddenly, mobile computing was about full size Notebooks running Celeron or Centrino chips. The coup d’grace came with the arrival of the iPhone. Smartphones used to be about the hardware, but with the iPhone’s success, it became software, software, software. Content was now king, and no one much cared about the chip powering it…but that was soon to change again.

The appearance of netbooks brought the last indignity. Suddenly the CPU was the issue again, but the market had outgrown the performance limitations of RISC and ARM. Netbooks become popular using Intel’s Atom chips with no ARM chips in sight, since after all, RISC chips can’t run Windows XP which has become the netbook OS of choice for most buyers.

Now however there has been a great deal of buzz about a new class of device built around ARM chips which is aiming to fill the desires of customers for an instant-on netbook, smaller and more like a smartphone in the way it connects to the net, that can be used for several days on a single charge. These have been dubbed Smartbooks by Qualcomm, who has pioneered the devices. Part of what makes such devices possible is the exceptional energy eficiency of the ARM architecture as well as the rise of new Operating Systems such as Android, custom Linux distros especially for small mobile devices, and the resurgence of older embedded software such as Windows CE.

An array of Smartbooks built around new generation ARM chipsets such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Nvidia’s Tegra platform from a mix of well known players and more obscure vendors, including Acer, Foxconn Electronics, Pegatron Technology (owned by Asus), Compal Electronics and Inventec Appliances, are expected to hit the market starting in the latter part of this year, according to industry sources in Taiwan. Several different companies are expecting Smartbooks to become the mobile hit they had assumed UMPCs or MIDs would be.

However, there are those who have strong doubts. Netbook titans Asus has noted that market demand for ARM-based smartbooks is still not strong enough and so they have shelved their Android based Eee PC Smartbook indefinitely. Jerry Shen, CEO of Asus said, "Currently, I still don’t see a clear market for smartbooks" and he is not alone. All we need to do is look at the recent failures of OQO, Raon Digital and such promising devices as Flipstart PCs and Samsung’s Q series to realize that this is a very risky experiment. How many different ways can vendors try to sell people a device type they just don’t seem to want?

So are smartbooks going to take up the mobile computing slack as netbooks are absorbed back into notebooks, filing the niche between phone and PC? Will they finally realize the promise of MIDs and UMPC devices that always seemed so tantalizingly close to success or will they become just another failed attempt at selling people unnecessary technology.